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One question that sticks out is whether or not Sally Dio is dead or alive. Jimmy Dale's former singing partner is also in play. Ridley Wellstone and his goons keep coming into the picture and providing problems. All of this comes to a smashing conclusion. Clete has always been a suspect in the plane crash that killed Sally Dio a hoodlum from Galveston. In this newest book the Louisiana crime fighters have moved to s new state.Clete Purcel and Dave Robicheaux nowcall Montana home.
Clete and Dave become the target of a cunning and vicious oil tycoon. She was Jimmy Dale's love interest, Her name is Jamie Sue Wellstone who has married into the Welstone family. They have plans to fish and relax in their new homw state. Mix into this story line Jimmy Dale Greenwood a former singer who has escaped from prison by cutting up Troyce Nix a part owner of the prison. Be sure to read this book. The state of Montana is shattered when two college students are found murdered.
They are always one step ahead of the law.
The main characters are always solid and the author easily includes references to other books without becoming confusing. These are books that I usually don't want to put down but also don't want to be over.
Maybe life is like that. After all the development, as is often the case in this genre, the climax and resolution occurs in a couple of paragraphs.
Reading a J.L. He incorporates poetry, philosophy, theology, and prison slang in a masterful way.
The epilogue was especially appreciated in weaving the loose ends. Burke novel is like visiting old friends.
I am a true fan of Burke's writing even though the plots are similar - if not predictable.
If it feels like JLB is preaching more than the Reverend Click he so despises, it can be forgiven considering the power of Burke's prose combined with a good-old-fashioned thriller with not much mystery but ample action and suspense. So by that standard, there is lots to like here - a long and multi-threaded but not tedious story with an equally long cast of damaged characters. One wonders if Burke has lost any sense of irony, lecturing about those who control other's lives just as Dave Robicheaux is shoving another guy's head into a flaming oven. Meanwhile, a deliciously oily evangelical preacher "Reverend Click" provides the perfect target for Robicheaux's indignant rage, while an unleashed Clete Purcel make Tiger Wood's sexual exploits look like a double bogie.
You don't need to get further than the first paragraph's "uncontrolled decent into a basement where the gargoyles turned somersaults like circus midgets" to be reminded that James Lee Burke can twist a phrase as well the best contemporary writers of American fiction. While "Swan Peak" may not live up to the lofty standards of "Last Car to Elysian Fields" or "Jolie Blon's Bounce", this is a fast paced and entertaining installment of American crime fiction that will not disappoint. But I quibble. And "Swan Peak" displays JLB at his lyrical best, taking the increasingly sullen Dave Robicheaux and wife Molly from Louisiana bayous and hurricanes to vacation among the mountains and rivers of Montana.
If there is weakness here, it is the author's seemingly endless harangue on the evils of capitalism, leading to some familiar and stereotyped fat cats who callously rape the earth for their profit while grinding the noble working class under the heels of their five-thousand dollar eel skin boots. Not that the perpetually uptight and introspective Robicheaux can really be expected to "vacation." And sure enough, almost before their first trout fly has hit the water, Dave and pal/human mayhem machine Clete Purcel find themselves up to their hip waders in the grisly murder of a pair of local college students.Burke is at his best when recounting violent tales of revenge and frontier justice, with or without redemption, especially when Clete plays more than a cameo role. From an escaped con with a big heart and his sadistic jailer to a once up-and-coming country music starlet to the aristocratic oil baron clan that has embraced her, Burke weaves another sordid tale of greed, depravity, and murder.
While Montanans routinely travel 20 or 30 miles to a restaurant, it is a long trip from Missoula to the Swan Valley. Not until near the end of the story does the author give some description of where the Swan area is. Up to that point, it would appear from the time frames and movements of the characters that the Swan is no more distant from Missoula than are the Hellgate area, Bonner, or Hamilton. While the mystery itself held my interest, and I love the location, I found little to enjoy in this book. Of minor issue are the couple of times when a federal highway (such as US 12) are referred to as state routes. Perhaps readers who are from Louisiana or who work in prisons will be familiar with the unusual terms and phrases, but this will not appeal to an audience of common American English speakers.Another reviewer mentioned that it is long. The most notable problems were the use of vocabulary and idioms that will leave many (perhaps most) readers a bit confused or searching for a dictionary of urban slang. Yes, the story is rather stretched out, and the narrative swings from tedious detailed descriptions of insignificant traits or actions of some characters or events to glossing briefly over others.The one other flaw is in the lack of geographic orientation.
Burke has his protagonist regularly divert into his theories of the warfare between "haves" and "have nots." Anyone with a decent income in a Burke mystery is usually corrupt, evil, twisted, and perverse. Right. If I want to read denunciations of the US capitalist system, there are plenty of outlets for it. Burke's past Robicheaux books indulged his taste for baroque twists of "fate," the use of landscape imagery to evoke a sense of evil or good, and lots of violence as the "good" guys took down the bad guys. I don't need it masquerading in the name of "mystery." But worse than the constant railing about every perceived injustice Burke sees is the sheer boredom of these two old drunk has-beens from New Orleans. Yet we're supposed to believe they're still bad cops who ignore all laws in order to get the really bad criminals, and still physically capable of intimidating bikers in bars and all manner of evil villains. IT's too bad Katrina didn't put them out of their misery.
An example (and there are endless ones) from Swan Peak: From a description of a vacation cabin: ".its grandeur had.been created by impoverished craftsmen hired by people with Midas levels of wealth." We read about the Iraq war and the desire of Americans to fill their SUV's with oil; we read about ex-Klansmen and their racial hatred, we read about the ultra-rich bad guys who control oil and porn and evangelist preachers who get out the vote on hate issues in order to elect their supporters.It's just boring to read, over and over, page after page,Dave Robicheaux's musings on life. It's a shame, because it's now both unbelievable and uninteresting. He seems to have lost control of his writing, or perhaps gained enough stature that no one dares edit his prose any longer. I was rooting for the bad guys this time, hoping that if they took out either Clete or Dave, we'd at least be spared the same old violent encounters. Yeah, right.Burke's earlier books were complex and interesting without descending too far into baroque plot lines that have to be wrapped so quickly that you're left wondering what it all meant.
By now, as he moves his setting from New Orleans to Montana, it's getting more than a little old, in part because of Burke's heavy-handed application of both purple prose and socialist invective. it's like the Hollywood casting of 60+ year old actors with 20-something actresses who fall for their wit and looks and charm. Based on their personal histories and the contemporary (2007) setting, they're old guys in their early 70's. Income, or money, or success, comes only with the loss of one's soul and integrity. Neither of them has changed in the 30 years they've been together.
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